On June 18, 2025, Dr. Samantha Ruppel from the Peace Academy Rhineland-Palatinate gave a public evening lecture at the University of Lübeck. Under the title "Shaping peace - but how? Focus on power and imbalances", she critically analyzed the dominant model of liberal peace and presented alternative concepts of hybrid peace. The focus was on the question of how peace work can succeed if power asymmetries, epistemic inequality and structural dependencies are taken into account.

The lecture was part of the event series "Peace in Theory?", which was conceived by Prof. Dr. Christina Schües (University of Lübeck). Using numerous empirical examples, Samantha Ruppel showed how local actors - despite structural inequalities - shape peace spaces and creatively adapt global norms to local contexts.

The following day, an in-depth workshop discussion entitled "The 'hybrid' peace? The entanglement of theory and practice". Together with the philosophers Cornelia Klinger, Pascal Delhom and Alfred Nordmann, central aspects of the lecture were taken up and discussed in an interdisciplinary manner. The focus was on questions of trust, technology, care and the linguistic limits of the concept of peace.

Samantha Ruppel's contribution provided an important impetus for the interdisciplinary discussion of peace concepts - and emphasized the need to understand peace work as a political and reflexive process.